Too many blows put parents in the canvas

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The good news is a survey of our young people is a strike for mums
and dads, writes Miranda Devine.

She is called America's real-life "desperate housewife", but a
Florida mother, Cat Barnard, and her husband, Harlan, have caused a
worldwide media fuss by going on a "parent strike" in protest at
their spoiled, lazy children.

It sounds like one of those "only in America" stories usually
reserved for the freak show part of the news bulletin, but the
Barnards have come to represent the ultimate capitulation and
impotence of the modern-day middle-class parent.

Apparently incapable of exerting some discipline over their
12-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, whom they say refuse to
do chores, the Barnard parents moved out of home this month -
albeit into a tent in the driveway. There they cook meals on a
barbecue and take phone calls from journalists on a portable phone,
alongside picket signs reading "Parents on strike" and "Seeking
co-operation and respect".

Such a public cry from the heart is hardly the way to go about
earning respect from children. But the desperation of today's
parents knows no bounds.

Wave after wave of new books and research fuel their angst,
identifying an unhappiness trend in children and sheeting home
blame to parents who are too lax, too selfish, too absent, too
hard-working, too stressed, too overbearing or all of the
above.

From dire warnings about teen suicide, childhood depression and
an epidemic of attention and conduct disorders, to Judith
Wallerstein's long-term study showing the pain of divorce affects
children 25 years on, parents are being confronted with bad news
scenarios like never before.

The most powerful recent book of the genre is Home-Alone
America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioural Drugs and Other
Parent Substitutes, by Hoover Institution scholar Mary
Eberstadt. The cover, showing a child clinging to the legs of a
besuited woman with briefcase as she strides away, leaves no doubt
about who is the villain.

Citing research showing American teenagers spend an average 3.5
hours a day alone, Eberstadt laments the rapidly diminishing amount
of time parents devote to their children, instead outsourcing
parenting to day-care centres where children are more likely to
catch infections and become aggressive. She says childhood obesity
is partly due to absent mothers who might otherwise be watching
what their children eat and sending them out to play instead of
viewing TV.

In her most celebrated chapter, mother-of-four Eberstadt
identifies the "furious child" problem which she says is evident in
teenagers' music, from Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain to Eminem and
Tupac Shakur.

"If yesterday's rock was the music of abandon, today's is that
of abandonment [with] its compulsive insistence on the damage
wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents,
and (especially) absent fathers."

Eberstadt has analysed the words of hit songs and found a common
theme.

"Many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new
generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in
song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear
family has done to them.

"Many bands and singers explicitly link suicide, misogyny, and
drugs with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal
past."

Eberstadt labels as "separationists" those feminists pushing for
universal child care for careerist women. She says our attempts to
balance work and family have been simply one long experiment in
parent-child separation, with tragic consequences.

"Too many kids now feel like just another chore to be juggled -
dropped off at day care; handed over to a nanny; left in front of a
television or a computer; and often simply home alone, with easy
access to all kinds of trouble."

In Sydney there is supposed to be a couple, lawyers, with two
small children, whom they deposit with shifts of nannies, plus a
weekend nanny who takes care of them so the parents can recover
from the stress of a work week. Perhaps it is an urban myth,
because I have not tracked down these parents. But the idea of
rearing children in similar circumstances, while preposterous, is
not unheard of in the suburbs.

Even today, with more emphasis on achieving a healthy
work-family balance, the workaholic dinosaur dad thrives. A recent
newspaper article featured high-powered Macquarie Bank executives
on a two-day course near Wisemans Ferry to encourage them to spend
more time with their young sons. "I just appreciated spending two
days with my son," said one father of his five-year-old. "It is
more time than I have spent with him in his entire life."

But whether or not the unhappiness among children Eberstadt
catalogues can be attributed to absent workaholic parents is
disputed by other research which says just the opposite.

An article last month in Psychology Today magazine titled
"A Nation of Wimps" claims it is over-anxious, omnipresent,
hothouse parenting which is the problem for children's mental
health. "Parental hyper-concern has the net effect of making kids
more fragile." The magazine cites research that children's
development is arrested because they no longer are able to engage
in unstructured play, because parents are regulating all aspects of
their lives, some schools have abolished recess, and lawsuits have
made playgrounds boring.

The mental health problems of university students have soared in
the past decade, with anorexia or bulimia afflicting about 40 per
cent of female students at some time, says the article. A lot of
the anguish can be blamed on pushy parents who won't release the
umbilical cord, who insist on "infantilising" their children,
wrapping them in cotton wool and keeping them "in a permanent state
of dependency".

Still, most parents I know do their best, from the fathers who
give up four hours every Saturday to coach or score for their
child's cricket game, to the mothers who drive for hours every week
to take the children to sport or organise school fetes.

In fact, busy as they are, this generation of parents is more
involved in its children's lives than previous generations. An
indication they are doing a good job comes from a survey this month
by Sweeney Research of more than 1000 Australians aged 16-28.

It found nine out of 10 young people said they have a good
relationship with their parents. In fact 53 per cent of the age
group still live at home and are overwhelmingly optimistic about
the future.

So there's no need for Australian parents to move into a tent in
the driveway just yet.